EEVL News: EEVL Update

New Sustainable Development section added to the EEVL Catalogue of Engineering Resources

It is now tacitly recognised that engineers, across all sectors of engineering, play an important role in shaping our environment and therefore have a professional responsibility towards ensuring sustainable development.

Sustainable development, defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) as 'Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs' has been integrated in most engineering curricula throughout the nation. The Engineering Council UK Output Standards for Accredited Engineering Programmes (April 2004) [1] stresses the need for engineering graduates to have an 'understanding of the requirement for engineering activities to promote sustainable development'.

In recognition of this fact, EEVL has added a Sustainable Development section to its catalogue of engineering resources. The section now lists over 100 sustainability resources. Examples include Higher Education sites such as the Centre for Sustainable Development in the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge [2], professional societies: IEE Networks for Engineers: Engineering for a Sustainable Future [3], journals: International Journal of Low Energy and Sustainable Buildings [4] and more.

The EEVL Sustainable Development section is available from the subject listing page [5].

New Improved OneStep Industry News and OneStep Jobs services

Several improvements have been made to EEVL's popular OneStep Industry News [6] and OneStep Jobs [7] services. The OneStep services, first reported in Ariadne Issue 37 [8] aggregate RSS feeds, and allow users to find, in turn, the latest sector news in engineering, mathematics and computing, and the latest job announcements from top recruitment agencies in the same subjects.

A number of new sources have been added to each service. OneStep Industry News now includes feeds from:

scenta [9] (scenta is an online gateway to science, engineering and technology)

These join sources which have already proved popular, such as e4engineering.com [22] and Buildingtalk [23]. OneStep Industry News now includes 60 RSS feeds from top news sources, making it a very handy way to scan the very latest news from a number of sources in one place.

as well as those sources which have already proved popular such as JobSite [30], The Engineer [31] and Jobs.ac.uk [32]. The latest feed to be added is from Jobs 4 Engineers [33]. OneStep Jobs now includes 25 top job announcement services, detailing several thousand of the very latest job vacancies in engineering, mathematics and computing.

As both of the OneStep services become more popular, more news publishers and recruitment agencies are being encouraged to produce RSS feeds for inclusion, so the lists above are not exhaustive, and we expect that more feeds will be added in the near future.

Some development work funded by JISC has enabled us to make several enhancements to both services. Boolean and phrase searching is now possible, though it should be kept in mind that the databases behind the OneStep services are relatively small, so care should be taken when searching. In addition, it is now possible to scan only breaking news and today's jobs by selecting New in Last 24 Hours from the drop-down option on the service pages. News and job announcement can also be restricted to the last 7 days, if desired.

New A3 size foot-shaped posters (shown below) promoting the two OneStep services will soon be distributed to university and college libraries and to a selection of academic departments. To request a copy of the posters, please contact R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk giving your name and address.

Posters for OneStep Industry News and OneStep Jobs

Forthcoming: New e-Journal Search Engines

EEVL's existing Engineering E-journal Search Engine [34] harvests the full text of over 70 freely available engineering e-journals. Many of the journals indexed are trade journals such as CE News [35] and Electronic Products [36] which tend not to be indexed in traditional abstracting and indexing databases. This may help to explain why this service is so popular, as it helps in the location of articles, product reviews and news reviews which are difficult to find from other sources. In the near future, we are going to produce e-journal search engines for the other two subjects covered by EEVL: mathematics and computing, plus a fourth e-journal search engine covering all three subjects together. We will also be completely revising the coverage of the engineering e-journal search engine, and adding a number of new journals to the index.